Publish at April 18 2023 Updated April 19 2023
"He who can no longer experience either wonder or surprise is, so to speak, dead: his eyes are extinguished."
Albert Einstein
This article comes from the habilitation work and conference of Joris Thievenaz, titled "S'étonner pour apprendre." For him, astonishment has a strong evocative potential. But what does it mean to be astonished, what does it imply? What process of astonishment is observable? The investigation starts from the researcher's astonishment that astonishment is underdeveloped in the field of adult learning.
The word for astonishment has the same root as "thunder". It originally referred to the individual struck dumb, dazed. The Old French "estournement" refers to the person dazed by a state of bodily shock. Astonishment is also a psychological state of experience. Thus, astonishment is as much bodily as it is psychological.
In the earliest uses of the term there is the idea of a thwarted expectation that leaves the person in a situation of uncertainty. Thievenaz explores trade dictionaries to understand the nuances of the word. He unearths old expressions such as "stunned like a bell caster" who sees his work ruined by a poor demolding. Astonishing the rock is a way of making it easier to cut. Or astonishment refers to the world of the built environment, to a crack in a vault or construction that has been shaken.
Over time and lexicons Thievenaz observes that the idea of shaking of crack or alteration is not retained. He keeps the idea of a mental and sensory-bodily process. It is the holistic subject who experiences the astonishment, the astonishment passes through the vector of the body as much as the mind.
Today, in common parlance, "to astonish" amounts to "to surprise". Yet astonishment is not surprise. To be astonished, one must be surprised, but, it is also necessary that the individual is altered in his certainties, his forecasts, his patterns of action, that he is jostled in his representations.
Thus, the surprise birthday, surprises us, pleases us perhaps but does not set us in motion, because, quickly enough, we know what is happening. The moment of surprise is soon over. An astonishment occurs outside the known. Surprise brings us into uncertainty, into an uncontrolled field that sets us in motion. Astonishment is thus a crossroads of thought, we must reflect to know where to go in the face of the unknown.
Thievenaz continues his investigation by exploring philosophical thought. Indeed, astonishment is a classic notion in the history of philosophy. "Philosophical astonishment" goes back to antiquity and the work of Plato and Socrates who present the experience of being astonished and more recently taken up by Deleuze who asserts
"knowing oneself learn to think make as if nothing is self-evident, being astonished that being is".
For Jane Hersch (1993) "philosophical astonishment" brings forth essential things. Astonishment is the condition for acquiring new knowledge to do this; Bachelard (1972) invites us to make reason polemic.
In synthesis, the process of wonder is a critical moment in activity, a moment of rupture of intelligibility, which potentially allows one to reorient one's world, and to reelaborate one's power to act. Astonishment allows one to find new ways of doing things. It is a gesture of thought rather than an affective state, a dynamic of disturbance and alteration of the predictable and the certain that involves the subject's commitment and finally a "strangification process" of the real, generator of reflexivity and potentially a source of learning.
By moving away from thought, the individual can open up to novelty, this is the experience from Zazzo's scientific autobiography (cf L'étonnement de René Zazzo) which evokes how his vocation for the study of twins was born. It is through the path of astonishment that his life path is modified. Astonishment is the beginning of his research
Not all will have the same impetus but, why not write diaries of work astonishment? Why not be amazed at the almost nothing in the life of the department, the small original amazing things that emerge. The question we can ask ourselves is "Where is the founding astonishment?"
For Thievenaz , everything happens as if the notion of astonishment was forgotten in the training of adults. There is however a pedagogy of the astonishment, the astonishments of 0 to 6 years, the pedagogy of the awakening is well present in the childish life, but nothing, in the adult life.
It is as if the process of astonishment remained in the logic of the philosopher extracted from the world to reflect on the world. The pedagogy of astonishment has remained in the idea of the pedagogy of awakening in the school world. This may be so because situations of wonder make manifest the fallibility (susceptible to error)of the adult.
The astonishment testifies to the frailties of the adult; to evoke one's astonishments in public is to highlight the uncertainties, the incapacities the weaknesses that one has become accustomed to keep silent in a group. However, the process of astonishment is an everyday resource, an "ordinary astonishment" is at the heart of our learning. Astonishment is a process of questioning the process at work, which is why it is not so simple to express it in front of a hierarchy.
For John Dewey "where there is astonishment there is desire for the experience of contacts, new and varied. Only this form of curiosity guarantees learning..."
Amazement takes us out of our thought patterns and there are many situations that allow for amazement
There are many fleeting moments of astonishment at work, and there are clue grids for observing work sequences and identifying astonishments and their expressions. This is not so simple, because, the process of astonishment is accompanied by another process of welcoming the indeterminacy of doubt and uncertainty.
An event brings discontinuity, uncertainty, which pushes to an activity of inquiry and investigation and leads to the search for clues to see more clearly. For Dewey, astonishment leads us to become an investigator in the situation and thus increases our power to act. With regard to the learning potential of the situation, how can we arouse and accompany astonishment?
Thievenaz models a triangle to present the process of astonishment that includes interrelationships between:
A key question is how to be surprised if there are no expectations? It would therefore be a matter of raising expectations so that astonishment is able to appear. The subject is able to experience astonishment because the conditions are right for it. Sometimes, the working conditions thwart astonishment:
There are tools to be amazed:
Let's become ethnologists and not get trapped by the objects of amazement allowed or tabooed by companies. Let's be amazed at everything and all the time.
Image: Deposit Photos - baranq
Sources
Dewey, J., & Deledalle, G. (1994). Logic. The theory of inquiry. Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l, 184(4).https://journals.openedition.org/rechercheformation/5596
Thievenaz, J. (2014). The interest of the notion of "inquiry" for the analysis of work in relation to training. Work and Learning, 13(1), 14-33.
https://journals.openedition.org/rechercheformation/5596?lang=en
Thievenaz, J. (2013). Investigating and learning at work. Approaching experience with John Dewey. Educational Research Journal.
https://journals.openedition.org/dse/4619
Thievenaz, J. (2016). Astonishment. Telemachus, 49, 17-29. https://doi.org/10.3917/tele.049.0017
Thievenaz Joris - https://lirtes.u-pec.fr/membres/membres-statutaires/thievenaz-joris
Wikipedia - Amazement https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Étonnement
G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, What is Philosophy?, Paris, Minuit, 2005
https://www.decitre.fr/livres/qu-est-ce-que-la-philosophie-9782707345363.html
J. Hersch, L'étonnement philosophique, Paris, Gallimard, 1993
https://www.decitre.fr/livres/l-etonnement-philosophique-9782070327843.html
Annick Ohayon, "L'autobiographie des psychologues au féminin et au masculin : Bianka et René Zazzo, un couple de psychologues dans le siècle (1930-2000)", in Jacqueline Carroy (dir.) Les femmes dans les sciences de l'homme (XIXe et XXe siècles) : Inspiratrices, collaboratrices ou créatrices ?, Éditions Seli Arslan, 2005
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